Bhasant! Bhisol Kahaan Hai? (BCQC October Open Quiz) - Report

Date: 21st Oct 2012
Conducted by: Aditya Gadre

Attended by ~10 teams

Format: 17 questions written elims; 2 written rounds; 60 questions on Infinite Rebounds with round reversal half-way; 5-question pounce.

Results:

1st: Team E: Avaneendra Bhargav and Aditya Chandorkar + (Vikram Keskar and Gaurav Keskar): 165 pts
2nd: Team D: Kunal Sawardekar and Ranajeet Soman + (Omkar Dhakephalkar and Mustafa Abbas): 140 pts
3rd: Team B: Salil Bijur and Bharat Marathe + (Chinmay Tadwalkar and Shreyas Jaju): 115 pts
4th: Team A: Anand Viswanathan and Varun Singh + (Vibhav Bhave and Rohan Danait): 110 pts
5th: Team C: Vaibhav Bajpai and Anshuman Sharma + (Aniket Deshpande and Mihir Talnikar): 30 pts

There was a low turnout for the quiz so all 10 teams were merged into 5 teams for the finals. Probably due to a late start and paucity of time and also the small number of teams, the QM chose to have only 17 questions for the prelims. This left scope for a lot more consumption of questions per-head in the finals.

Personally, I liked the quiz - there were a good mix of topics with no biases to any one, no memorable peters or obvious sitters. Team E led from the start with Team D close behind. Perhaps the delays in getting the venue stretched the duration leading to members from Team D leaving in between. But young Omkar held the fort and maintained their position. A fun time was had by all.

Please leave your reviews in the comments.

The Calvin & Hobbes Quiz - Report

Set and conducted by : Vikram Keskar
Format : 40 question written quiz (20 questions with a Calvin & Hobbes theme, 20 gen questions)

Results:
1st : Aditya Gadre and Avaneendra Bhargav : 30.5 points
2nd : Kunal Sawardekar and Ranajeet Soman : 24 points
Newbie team : 17.5 points (names not available)

The quiz turned out to be only half C&H as the QM had difficulty finding enough questions. The questions were not C&H trivia but the many many pop-culture/philosophical references Watterson uses in the comic. There were quite a few philosophy related questions earlier on but with the QM's 'usual shtick' as he likes to call it, the cryptic clues were helpful in confirming guesses.
The other 20 questions were good old general quiz type. The quality of the questions was good and they were well framed.
There were numerous typos in the questions and one or two errors (Kunal had a field day pointing them out). The projector refused to be turned on (no pun here) and we had to shift to another room ten questions through the quiz which was slightly tedious. An enjoyable quiz that would have been more so with 'tech support' and a little more attention to detail. 

Bangiya Sanskriti Samsad Open Quiz - Report

Date : 19-10-2012
Theme : General
Set and Conducted by : Avaneendra Bhargav
Format : 30 question elims.  Finals - 10 question written round, 18+18 IR

Results:
 1st place : Meghashyam Shirodkar, Niranjan Pedanekar, Amit Garde  132 points
2nd place : Ranajeet Soman, Aditya Chandorkar, Rohan Jain  65 points
3rd place : Sachin Ravi, Suraj Prabhu, Abhinav Pathak   28 points
4th place : Bharat Marathe, Omkar Dhakhephalkar, Debopriyo Moulik  22 points
5th place: Finehas Pinto + 2     21 points
6th place : CVR Shastry + 2     0 points


The quiz started late by almost an hour and a half (nobody complained though).  There was a lot of bureaucratic decision making going on with teams made to sit in order of their registration numbers for no practical reason and time was wasted on petty issues.
The elims were good with an even spread of topics. The lack of a projector was a hindrance as the teams sitting in the back rows weren't able to see the LCD screen clearly. The QM read out the relevant points in all questions helping the quizzers.
The finals started at 9.30 pm and hence had to be curtailed by scrapping two written rounds and 6 out of 42 IR questions. Finals started with a Simpsons cameos written round with 10 questions each for 2 points. 6 questions with 5 points each would have been a better idea as the first round made no real difference in scores.
The IR was a bit heavy on business and literature but was overall good. Some nice fundae were evinced and the quiz was interesting. Meghashyam, Niranjan and Amit were in hot form for the entire quiz pulling away to a big lead early on. Our team was comfortably leading the rest throughout for 2nd place.Suraj, Sachin and Abhinav too were 3rd since the beginning and it stayed so.
Overall it was a good quiz but a serious quiz at the Congress Bhavan (no political commentary intended) seemed incongruous to people who have attended previous quizzes by the BSS.
P.S. : No sighting of the sound guy Kulkarni kaka or any mention of Bhasantrao was made much to the disappointment of previous attendees.

The BCQC October Open Announcement

Who here is not a fan of Calvin and Hobbes? Vikram Keskar puts together a set of questions based on everyone's favourite cartoon strip. So transmogrify into that quiz nut, duplicate yourself in case you have other plans and be sure to feed that tiger at home - and come for the Calvin and Hobbes quiz this Sunday. 

Quiz 1: Calvin and Hobbes themed written quiz

Quizmaster: Vikram Keskar 

Flavour: Calvin and Hobbes 

Format:  Written quiz (bring a writing instrument) ; two members per team; no prior registration needed; no entry fees

Timings 1:00 pm to 2.00 pm 

Date: 21st October (Sunday)

Venue: Seminar Hall II, College of Engineering, Pune 

~ ~ ~ 

Once upon a time there was a quiz. It was a nice quiz. It was a fun quiz. It was a quiz that everybody loved. It was the Durgotsav All Pune Open Quiz Championship organised by the Bangiya Samskriti Samsad. Thousands came every year to hear the that melodic Bengali voice going "Bhasant! Bhisol kahaan hai?" 

But then everything changed. Giving in to minor protests by so-called intellectual quizzers and reflecting a clear Maoist bias, the BSS has done away with the Bengali QM and brought in Oboneendro instead. In protest of this massive loss to the Pune Quizzing Community, we are conducting a Memorial Bhisol Quiz. 

Quiz 2: Bhasant! Bhisol Kahaan Hai?

Quizmasters: Aditya Gadre and Shubhankar Gokhale

Flavour: General (Visuals only)

Format:  One minute silence followed by written prelims (bring a writing instrument) followed by a final ; two members per team; no prior registration needed; no entry fees

Timings 3:00 pm to 6.00 pm 

Date: 21st October (Sunday)

Venue: Seminar Hall II, College of Engineering, Pune 

Bangiya Sanskriti Samsad Open Quiz

The most Bengali sounding non-Bengali Oboneendro (Avaneendra) Bhargav has set and will host this edition of the quiz which has a cult following in the city. Promises to be good. Show up to have a good time. On the spot registrations allowed.

 

  P.S. There are food stalls with delicious Bong dishes at the venue. NOT complementary though.

Torquest : The Science and Technology Quiz -Report

Set by Amit Patil and Rohan Danait with inputs from Neelima Jha & Mihir Khatwani
Theme: Science and Technology (Sci-Tech)
Date/Venue: 5th October 2012, Auditorium (Elims) & Room No.13 at College of Engineering, Pune
Format: 30 Question Elims, 46 Question Finals (18 IR +10 Special round (XKCD) + 18 IR Rev)
Total Teams: 54
Results:
1st Place: Debanjan Bose and Hari Nair (Team F: Fish Curry Rice) - 135 pts [Elims: 26 (5*)]
2nd Place: Nikhil Motlag and Avaneendra Bhargav (Team B: Einstein Ke Frankenstein) - 115 pts[Elims: 16 (4*)]
3rd Place: Rohit Iyer and Ravi Handa (Team E: The Latecomers) - 110 pts [Elims: 20 (3*)]
4th Place: Ranajeet Soman and Sachin Ravi (Team D: Quizzing For Nirvana) - 45 pts [Elims: 20 (4*)]
5th Place: Abhishek Bagade and Ameya Bhagat (Team C: Yuva) - 25 pts [Elims: 18 (4*)]
6th Place: Harshal Sarda and Shantanu Hadgekar (Team A: Tech-Wizards) - 10 pts[Elims: 11 (3*) ]

Best College Team (outside the finalists): Ayush Bhat and Yateen Kedare Elims: 11 (2*)

The elims were a little tech heavy but overall good. A greater variety in fundae could have been achieved with a little more research and repetition could have been avoided ( like 2 questions about Apple products).
Too much time was given for each question and the elims stretched on for the better part of an hour.

The finals had good questions for the most part but one or two teams got lucky with sitters coming their way (for eg : origin of the VAIO logo). Debanjan and Hari were leading since the beginning followed by Ravi and Rohit in second and Avaneendra and Nikhil at third place. Our team was also in contention till the halfway mark.

The xkcd round upset the entire balance of proceedings. 10 questions each with 10 points based on xkcd alone is way too heavy and it creates an uneven playing field.  People who do not follow the webcomic are at a clear disadvantage. Though most answers could be figured out by non-followers, negative scoring deterred teams from taking educated guesses. Team F scored a massive 75 points and pulled away virtually out of reach.

The second half had decent questions with teams B and E scoring heavily. There were quite a few astronomy based questions. There are many other fields that can be explored in a sci-tech quiz which were found lacking.

Overall it was a decent quiz and well conducted by Amit. A little more attention to detail and more research before the quiz would have made it more enjoyable. Hope next year it the Torquest team comes up with an even better quiz.

Qonnoisseur- The MELA Quiz at MindSpark : Report

Qonnoisseur- The MELA Quiz at COEP's MindSpark 2012

Conducted by Rohan Danait

1st: Swapnil and Akib: 150 pts
2nd: Kunal sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav: 115 pts
3rd: Aditya Gadre and Annanya Deb: 105 pts
4th: Ranajeet Soman and Rohan jain: 95 pts
5th: Ravi and Rohit: 75 pts
6th: Debanjan Bose and Hari Nair: 65 pts

Positives:

- The quiz was a huge contrast from Chakravyuh the previous day - the effort in setting the quiz was apparent.
- The quiz started off with a nice elims set - a few questions could have been better framed but overall a good effort.
- The elims were engaging and well conducted - a big thumbs up for a lot of visual content as well
- The finals had quite a few nice questions - and most questions were well framed
- The ppt was well thought out - everything we needed was on the slides
- The caricatures round was really nice
- Overall the quiz was light and interesting - most teams seemed to like it.

Negatives:

- After reminders and announcements that the quiz has been advanced to 10am, it started at 11 am anyway.
- The quiz (elims + finals) was a bit of a disappointment on the balance front as it turned out to be very Hollywood heavy. Very few questions on music, other entertainment, TV or arts. Nearly nothing at all on India.
- Lack of AV content in the finals
- Some peters here and there - could have been avoided by getting the questions reviewed by resident EntGawds
- Content-wise my only major issue with the quiz was the theme - the connection was extremely loose and possibly even worse lexical. In general "movies of XYZ" make for horrible themes, and this was one. The QM could have explored so much more in a quiz on Music, Entertainment, Literature and Arts - and it saddens me that the theme was also a Hollywood based theme.
- The theme like Chakravyuh was ridiculously high on weightage in terms of points (60!) thus favouring Gary Oldman like crazy. Themes should never have more than 2-3 questions weightage IMO.

The quiz turned out to be quite close with all teams at almost identical scores at the halfway mark - three teams (Swapnil & Akib, Rohan & Ranajeet and us) pulled away in the second half only. Before going into the theme, we were leading, R&R were second. S&A and K&A leapfrogged us on the theme round to take 1st and 2nd respectively.

Chakravyuh 2012 - Report

The Chakravyuh Open Quiz - A part of COEP's MindSpark 2012

Conducted by: Neelima Jha

Attended by ~100 teams

Results:

1st: Kunal Sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav: 120 pts
2nd: Aditya Gadre and Vikram Keskar: 115 pts
3rd: Debanjan Bose and Hari Nair: 60 pts
4th: Vikram Joshi and Abhinav Dasgupta: 40 pts
5th: Ranajeet Soman and Rohan jain: 20 pts
6th: Nikhil and Vishvesh: 5 pts

This year's Chakravyuh happened on a Saturday, a welcome change from last year which meant that a few of us could travel from out-of-town to take part.

The elims were, there is no other way to say this, bad. Ambiguously worded questions and no prior thought into what the expected answer was led to the post-elim period turning into a bargaining contest - teams tried to convince the QM about how their answer was correct as per their interpretation of the question and the QM actually gave in on far too many occasions. One thing that irritated me was that the visuals were run only at the end of the elims - thus giving the teams only a couple of looks at the picture and not much time in case you wanted to spend time on that particular question (which is the biggest advantage of a pen and paper elims as opposed to a ppt elims).

Once we had gotten over BDFL not qualifying (that I have never seen BDFL this happy to not qualify, says something about the elims) - we got onto the finals.

The positive was  that there were only about 5-7 god-awful peters so about 35 odd new /kinda-new questions(a decent figure for a college quiz). Also there were some nice fundas explored.

With respect to content three major issues that really put me off in  the finals were
1. Too many questions simply said "Give Funda" which other than saying "Guess what I am about to ask you" is the worst way to ask a quiz question. Some great fundas were ruined by this lazy framing.
2. Serious problems with the notability of some of the answers. Calling them arbit would be an understatement (eg. 1981 TV movie about a sport that practically NO-ONE watches in India)
3. The theme was worth 70 points (!) with points for individual answers (another 70 points!). So hypothetically, I could be a space nut and win the quiz by simply cracking the theme and answering all the questions correctly and not knowing anything else across the quiz. Not blaming the organizers too much for this due to their inexperience but certainly this is something the QMs should keep in mind for future events.

The same issues about lack of clarity from the elims in expected answers led to several more bargaining sessions.

Another issue in terms of conducting the quiz was that what was written on the slide in terms of rules/ what was expected / half points policy was frequently changed throughout the quiz.

Overall, I would say the quiz was okay at best. There was some decent material and the quiz could have been a lot better by ensuring simple things - like writing out real questions, clarity in points, runnign through the quiz in your head once before actually conducting it etc

In terms of an experience, the quiz was awesome fun, at least for those of us on stage - constant trolling, funny answers, Kunal's fatwas and Ranajeet's rascism - made it all a fun few hours spent.

Winners list so far
2001: Shrirang Raddi and Amalesh Mishra
2002: Shrirang Raddi and Amalesh Mishra
2003: Niranjan Pedanekar and Samrat Sengupta
2004: Gaurav Sabnis and Neeraj Sane
2005: Sudarshan Purohit and Amit Garde
2006: Gaurav Sabnis & Shamanth Rao
2007 (Apr): Kunal Sawardekar and Shamanth Rao
2007 (Oct): Avinash Mudaliar and Harikrishnan Menon
2008: J. Ramanand and B.V.Harish Kumar
2009: Anand Sivashankar and Amit Garde
2010: J. Ramanand and B.V.Harish Kumar
2011: Meghashyam Shirodkar and Yash Marathe
2012: Kunal Sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav

Big Q: Results

Name	Score
J Ramanand	73
Salil Bijur	63
Kunal Sawardekar	53
Ranajeet Soman	38
Rohan Danait	27
Debojyoti Adhikari	25
Mihir Talnikar	18